Page 22 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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I walked up through the city at dawn, and by then, the heralds were calling the stay-at-home order: the census would start at noon. Night market vendors packing up to go home, dusty and tired, looked annoyed about the noise; the homeless people on the road verges barely stirred; and some knights coming back to the garrison after the Hidden ride wondered grumpily if that would mean they had to be awake at noon. It felt like a mad luxury to be able to hear it all. Yesterday, I would have come this same way and not known the heralds were out until I saw them. Now, I could hear five at a time, streets apart. All of Thebes was full of their bells ringing and the clear voices calling. They would do it for an hour now, and an hour before the census began.

I should have felt hazy from the broken night, especially after what the triplets had told me, but I was full of energy. I kept hearing things I didn’t recognise and soon found myself playing a game to see how many I could guess. There was a skimming noise that turned out to be a weaver’s shuttle as she skimmed it through her loom, a shush that was dead leaves tumbling on the road, and then, incredibly, the hiss of the paintbrush as a man worked brilliant colours into the glaze of a new mask at a tiny table he’d set up outside his pottery shop. It was exquisite, and so were the others drying on pegs on the wall behind him. Word must have been spreading fast, about what the witches had done.

After that, I saw more of them. When I passed the Temple of Ares—where, gods alive, I could hear the disjointed songs of the knights inside—there was a delivery cart with its two drivers unloading and four guards with them. All six of them were wearing full masks, painted in colours and gold, the faces all the blank and beautiful, like young lords and ladies come to a feast.

The census began with a briefing for the census-takers—Palace scribes all—at the Guards’ Court. I explained that we were looking particularly for young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, because before long, we might have to start a general army draft, and we needed to know who we’d got before anyone had time to hide. Everyone took it silently. The Guards were standing on the edge of the gathering, watching, and I knew they were looking for anyone who seemed too intrigued and too chatty; anyone who might imagine that the silence order didn’t apply if they just told one or five neighbours and a few kitchen slaves.

My part of the grid was the High City; the garrison, where I’d know straightaway if anything was odd, and the Temples of Ares, then the Bronze Court and the Weavers’ Court. I always liked visiting the weavers; they hung gigantic bolts of cloth up to dry from dyeing, each one sixty yards long, and they flew over everything like the battle banners of giants.

A census sounds easy. You just have to take details from everyone and note them down. But the logistics of doing that on clay tablets were exhausting. I could fit maybe four people on each tablet, if I wrote small. So I arrived with a crate of tablets—or rather, a burly slave and a crate of tablets—and by the time I’d covered the weavers, the whole crate was used up. While the slave fetched another box of new tablets from the main administration office, I ran the old crate over to the Potters’ Court for firing. Their yard was already filling up with crates from other census-takers, the heat from the kilns was already blistering, and potters were working soaking wet from the fountain, because it was only way to stay even half cool enough.

On the pretence of looking for smuggled gold or silver, the Guards searched everywhere we collected information. They, at least, knew who we were looking for. It felt profoundly inefficient. I kept pausing to uncramp my writing hand, fantasising about just putting out a general proclamation: forty talents of silver for Pentheus returned to us safe and well. But then the Egyptians would hear, and Prince Apophis would make doubtful noises about handing over his grain, and the Queen’s authority would seem untrustworthy if she couldn’t even keep a good rein on her own son, and it would all be a mess.

When it was the garrison’s turn, the young knights seemed mutedly pleased to see me, but they were quiet, and I saw why straightaway. At least ten of them were missing. All gone to Ares; all singing that infuriating song. I could smell alcohol in the air, and even though that would have been enough for a garrison-wide lockdown in normal times, everyone was pretending not to notice. Amphitrion’s sister was by herself in a corner. Polydorus, Jason’s commander, had taken over while I was gone.

“How have they been?” I asked. We were in the mess, each unit lined up and waiting to be registered, either by me or by one of the scribes.

He shook his head. “A lot of them ... they’re having nightmares. All the same thing.”

I stopped writing. “The same thing?”

He leaned forward half an inch, his version of a nod. “I have it too. It’s a hunt. There’s a lion, and the hunters and the dogs kill it, but once it’s dead, it turns into a man. It must be an omen, but I asked the priest at the shrine to Apollo and he didn’t know.”

“A lion that turns into a man,” I said, uncomfortable and not sure why. There was something familiar about it.

Polydorus was quiet for a second. Across from us, still in the line, obediently enough, Feral Jason was dissecting something which I hoped had been dead already. Polydorus watched him with the blankness of a person who had given up on trying to protect anything smaller than a dog. “They say everyone dreams prophecy when a god is close.”

“Don’t let anyone hear you say that,” I said, looking around for Penelope now that I’d seen Jason. It was a relief when I realized she was curled up under the table, eating a basket of dandelions. I stroked her ears to say hello. She bleated hospitably.

She wouldn’t last much longer. I’d arrived exactly as lunch did, and it was sparse. The bread loaves were much smaller than normal. There were olives and apples that looked like they’d been in the stores for months, still good but not very; some oil, some oranges that must have been imported or pirated because our own groves had failed this year; but no cheese, no milk, not even eggs. Knights only have meat at festivals or after sacrifices, it’s too luxurious to give even to the Sown every day, but usually that translated into once a week. It had been a month since I’d seen any here. What was on the tables now were starvation rations. Around the edges of the room, the slaves were watching with a vulture intensity.

I was hungry too. I’d been too busy to notice mostly, but now I was sitting here, it was difficult to remember what I was supposed to be talking about. I wanted some of that bread more than anything. I was entitled to it, it was part of my rations, but I’d be able to get something somewhere else. At least I was on the border of the forest. I could shoot something tonight. I would. There’s only so long you can get by on bread and oil. I split one of the meagre little loaves in half and lobbed one half to a little boy, one of the kitchen children, and gave the other to Polydorus.

“You need to eat,” Polydorus said to me, grave.

“I’m smaller than you,” I said. “And I’m on writing duty, not training.” I lifted the stylus.

He stared at the bread and I thought he was going to refuse, because at least among knights, it’s shameful to accept a gift from anyone you don’t feel is your equal or better—he certainly didn’t think I was his equal—but he took it.

“Why are you on writing duty?” he asked, in his sniper way. “Jason thinks the Queen is keeping you in a secret harem.”

“With this face? No, it’s administrative rubbish.”

He lifted his chin a fraction. “And it’s nothing to do with how nobody has seen Pentheus since the star fell.”

Fuck.

“Why would my going blind staring at tablets have anything to do with Pentheus being in a sanctuary?” I asked, making an effort to sound light.

“Because if he has the madness, then he’s out of the succession, and you’re ... it,” he said. “You’re the Queen’s brother-in-law. You’re on desk duty because it takes you away from anything dangerous. If you’re killed, there’s no other obvious successor.”

I almost dropped my tablet. “Polydorus—gods’ sake, I am not anything to do with the Queen, and the succession is not determined by some random moron marrying the Queen’s younger brother, that would be stupid, the succession is determined by the Queen. If anything happens to Pentheus, there are slaves in the fields with better links to the royal family than me. I wasn’t even born in Achaea, I’m probably Egyptian.”

“You’re a good liar,” he said, with exactly the coolness and certainty of his own integrity I had aimed at Dionysus when I first spoke to him at the dance, and for the first time, I felt how unpleasant it was to be on the receiving end. It was righteous, in a shut-down way that looked—from this end—cultish. I frowned into that thought, because it was a jellyfish thought: there were things in the tentacles that trailed down deep and shimmered with a nasty electrical sting, though I couldn’t see what they were just yet.

“I will stab you in the liver with this stylus.”

He tipped his head in a way that said he would have very few opinions about it even if I did, and ate the bread.

I carried on writing names, checking down the tables and counting to make sure I hadn’t missed anyone, and trying not to do it too resentfully. Any garrison is a rumour nursery, but because they weren’t allowed to listen to bards to get their dose of made-up twattery that way, Theban knights grew bushier and more luxuriant rumours than anyone else in Achaea. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Jason flicked something biological at one of the other boys, who yelled and punched him. Polydorus’s stare migrated into the distance.

“Does this need to involve me?” I said, sliding the traditional razor into my voice.

“It was a lung ! Permission to throw him down the fucking well, sir?”

“Granted,” I said, in case there were still miracles.

“I’m going to make a sacrifice to the mad god,” Polydorus said, as matter-of-fact as he would have been if he were saying he was off to the market for honey; not suggesting treason. “Do you want me to buy a lamb or something for you?”

“ No! ” I hissed. “Fuck, you’ll be sent to the galleys!”

There was a shriek that sounded suspiciously like someone being bitten by Feral Jason.

“I know,” Polydorus said dreamily.

By the time I’d finished my grid section, the potters had done a great deal of work, and most of the tablets from the rest of the census-takers were already fired. They were stacking them in the middle of the courtyard so they could be taken down to the archives, so I set up there to see the incoming census-takers as they gave in their tablets. The census was not, said the Queen, entirely irrelevant: it was useful to know how many people we needed to feed. In any case, it was important to pretend the census data was what we had wanted. The Egyptians were wandering around the Palace freely, and if they realized we appeared to have conducted a census but taken no records, someone would put two and two together.

I marked off grid sections as each scribe came back. Everyone said the same thing: no sign of Pentheus.

As the number of open, possible grid sections shrank, I started to feel a dull certainty that the Hidden must have missed something on the road. But I’d seen the report from the unit polemarch. They had stopped every wagon on the road and turned them upside down, but nothing. Of course, someone could have paid her off—not hard when the rations were sinking to nothing—but if that had happened, if Pentheus had been taken to Athens or Sparta ... surely we would have heard from the Athenians or the Spartans by now, sniggering and demanding ludicrous sums of silver?

Two figures were moving through the smoke more slowly than the potters, one very tall. I went down on my knee when I saw the sway of the Queen’s long hair, which, like always, gave me a sorrow-hope twang, because in that first instant I felt like it might be Helios. The Queen bent to lift me up again.

“You remember Apophis,” she said.

“Vividly,” I said, looking him up and down in a way I hoped would discourage any urge he might have to speak to me.

Apophis was looking at some of the tablets. “Is this writing?”

I wondered what amazing Egyptian misunderstanding I was about to be treated to now. “It is.”

“Is it just numbers?” he asked after a moment.

“No. These are names, these are addresses; holdings.”

“But there are so few signs. How are you getting down the information?”

Another belter.

The Egyptian view is, as far as I can tell, that if you’re not a master artist willing to dedicate twenty years of your life to learning thousands of symbols, you have no business writing or reading anything and you ought to shut up before someone comes along to smite you.

“Each sign is a sound,” I explained. “Ta, ke, ka, like that. We only have so many sounds.” Forty-two.

“It doesn’t seem very sophisticated.”

“It isn’t. It isn’t for temples and monuments, it’s for noting things propped against a horse. You write in Coptic sometimes, don’t you? That’s just lines and dashes.”

He frowned. “That’s shorthand. Writing is sacred. Words can last for eternity. Some effort ought to go into them. Do you not think?”

I wrestled heroically with the urge to shove him in a kiln. “We like it for tax purposes.”

He laughed and turned to the Queen. “I was under the impression that you didn’t have writing out here, Agave. This is a nice surprise. You must teach one of my scribes, so we can translate your holy texts. Our scholars would like that very much.”

That would be hysterical. I’d once tried to tell an Egyptian the story of Athena’s birth—she is wisdom, and so logically enough she sprang from her father’s head, heads being where wisdom tends to gestate—and what he took away from it was that I had no understanding of reproduction in mammals.

“I’m sure they would,” said the Queen, sounding very much like she had the same concerns as me. “Thank you, Heliades.”

Apophis drifted away, still looking puzzled.

The Queen switched into Achaean. “Anything?”

“Nothing,” I said quietly, aware that it would have been idiotic for the Egyptians to come here without at least one person who could understand Achaean. Still, maybe they were arrogant enough not to bother.

She nodded once. “Well. Thank you.”

“What will happen if we can’t find him?”

“The grain ships are anchored at Aulis. They’re guarded by three thousand soldiers.”

“Three thousand ?” I repeated.

She nodded again. She was beginning to look calm to the point of disinterested. Helios had used to do that. It was instead of screaming and punching someone. “What do you think? Can the garrison take those ships, against those numbers?”

Egyptians are terrible sailors. It’s because the Nile is so straightforward. The current takes you to the sea even if you sit on a raft with no rudder and you flounder about like a confused octopus. On the open sea, we would have the advantage; but in total, including my unit of brand-new, barely trained knights, some of whom had never sailed, there were only two thousand of us. It had been five thousand before Troy.

“Yes, but we’d lose half the garrison.”

“I might yet have to give that order,” she said. She looked grey, and not just from the smoke.

I bowed my head. “Duty is honour.”